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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
From the mailbag
A couple of quick notes from the mailbag:
- Quite a few readers have written to argue that the $50M+ Picasso that everyone is talking about isn't that great a Picasso. Well, I haven't seen it in person so I'm pretty wary of passing along a judgment with my name on it, but I'd say this: Auctions aren't about big numbers for the best paintings. Auctions are about big numbers for paintings that come available. Picasso Rose Period paintings don't come up that often. Here is a list of the top ten paintings to sell at auction. It's not loaded with masterpieces, just very good paintings that were available.
- A reader informs me that my idea of building an underground parking lot for the Barnes on the Episcopal Academy property is DOA. The Barnes is apparently built on bedrock.
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More on the $50-100 million-ish Picasso
NOTE: My Jim Dine drawings @ the National Gallery of Art review is up at Artnet.
NYT'er Carol Vogel's auction preview story is out. (If you're new to the story, it involves this Picasso, up next Wednesday, May 5 at Sotheby's.) We discussed this at length in the post below this one, so I'll just point out that today Vogel includes this line:
"Experts at Sotheby's, which has put a $70 million estimate on "Boy With a Pipe," shiver at the mention of $100 million for the work, saying all the spin is scaring away potential bidders."
Does anyone believe that? It's that buzz that got them a major auction preview story in the New York Times and in other outlets. This, in turn, creates the buzz that drives future sales.
The Boston Globe's preview story, by Tatsha Robertson, is much better sourced. Sure, two of the quoted have pretty strong interests in seeing a record (and Robertson mostly shows she's really good at calling Feigen-related phone numbers), but I'd still take Robertson's sources over Vogel's flacking.
Bloomberg also previews the auctions, but you'll never stay awake through the whole story.
Sidenote: The Greentree Foundation, described by Vogel as "established to further international relations," actually mostly does other things. Greentree is a Chinati Foundation supporter, hosts meetings of Long Island-based foundations, focuses on educational enhancement projects started by community groups, and supports ecological preservation. Their Form 990 is here. Because this is journalism about art (and commerce), the NYT apparently did not check it beforehand and likely will not run a correction nor a clarification.
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Carol Vogel wants a record!
Admin note: Just about every post I've made today was updated during the afternoon. If you've already read 'em, take a second look for the updates.
I haven't seen it yet, but don't miss tomorrow's Carol Vogel piece in the NYT. In it, she will do Sotheby's bidding, flacking the possibility that Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe will set an auction record for highest price paid for a painting. (The record was set by Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, an average Van Gogh that was bought for $82.5 million in 1990. Its purchase and subsequent semi-disappearnce is wonderfully chronicled by Cynthia Saltzman in her book The Portrait of Dr. Gachet.)
Sotheby's says that the painting has been valued in excess of $70M (they quote that figure in a nice little promotional Flash presentation that you can access here), but, of course, it's in their interest to say so. (Except, of course, in their catalogue, where they say that the painting's estimate is available "upon request." What transparent poppycock -- and what a silly way to drive up the price.) I predict that Vogel will jump in tomorrow and that she will shamelessly pump the painting. If there was ever any doubt that Vogel is in the back pocket of the auction industry, here's betting that Friday's write-up will dispel it.
(How do I know all this? The NYT teased it in print today. And I've read Vogel's previous reporting on this painting. We'll see if I'm right...)
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Me on Jim Dine @ Artnet
 From my Artnet Magazine review of the National Gallery of Art's Jim Dine drawings show:
"Why is the National Gallery launching a Jim Dine drawing show and why now?
Here's what I came up with: It is spring break and cherry blossom season in Washington and the National Gallery decided to put on a nice show for the tourists to come see. (Not that the National Gallery would cop to that.)"
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News & Notes
Admin note: If you link to the main page of MAN, I see it on my hit stats. If you link to any other page, I don't. So if you link to me and I don't drop you a note of thanks or some such thing, 'tis why.... (This reminder prompted by Gawker being kind enough to link to MAN yesterday... and not showing up in our hit stats!)
Greg Allen is having fun with auctions too. He makes a fine find here and -- coincidence -- has a daughter for sale. (There is nothing easier than posting about the auctions -- five minutes of work = long post.)
Saskia Olde Wolbers won the Beck's Futures prize in London yesterday. Los Angeles art-goers have already seen the winning entry, Placebo. It was in Displaced, a strong group video show at the Hammer last year.
The Boston Globe runs a nice slide show of the new Gehry at MIT. The review is here.
And AJmate Andrew Taylor has a must-read on the Milwaukee Art Museum's budget mess. You could substitute "Corcoran" or "Guggenheim" or lots of others and it would be just as relevant. (Did I mention that Taylor's post is a must-read?)
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At market, photography is hot
How hot is photography? Sotheby's held a photography auction last night, you know, the "from a private collection," kind of thing. Forty of the 43 lots sold for over the high estimate. Now I don't know anything about the auction histories of the artists whose work was up last night (it would be easy enough to look up, but I have a real job!), but 40 of 43 seems damned impressive. A couple interesting notes:
An Arbus photo estimated at $250-350K went for $479K. Robert Frank was super-hot. This image had a $20-30K estimate and gaveled at $131K. You can flip through the results, with images, starting here.
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Sotheby's Highlights
Yesterday we featured some favorite lots from the upcoming Christie's auctions. Today we look at Sotheby's (note: the links are slooow to load):
- Sotheby's is devoting an entire auction to a collection of Carleton Watkins fascinating, art historically-crucial photos of Yosemite. They're well-worth the browse.
- This divisionist Matisse (it would be fair to call it a near-ish-pointillist painting) is from a crucial period in his life, just as he was about to break through into fauvism. The estimate is $1.5-2M. Art history buffs will notice that this work was painted in late 1904 or early 1905, just as Matisse was emerging from a public scandal involving his wife's family and just before Matisse said goodbye to Flemish earth-tones and hello to color. (Hilary Spurling's fine first volume of an expected two-volume biography of Matisse chronicles this wonderfully. Aside: After Matisse, Spurling should do Bonnard. Or someone should.)
- If you like horses, you'd have loved the John Hay Whitneys.
- Chunky girls + flowers = Dull. Chunky girls + flowers + Renoir = $4-6M.
- If I'm going to drop $4-6M on a Balthus, I think I'd want it to be a little, well, naughtier.
- A good but not great Picasso for $10-15M? Sure, the painting is all about Picasso v. Matisse, and there was a big Picasso v. Matisse show that just traveled 'round, but $15M? Sotheby's is being mighty aggressive with those estimates this year. See the two previous paintings for confirmation.
- $1-1.5M for a guy with a cowlick? Oh, wait...
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Christie's Highlights
Some favorite lots from Christie's upcoming moden and contemporary art auctions (Sotheby's favorites coming tomorrow):
- If Albert Barnes were with us today, he'd jump on this. Then again, this Renoir might be too good for him.
- Christie's has a good bit of Bonnard up, including this colorful little landscape, estimated for $350-450K. This is a rather unusual Bonnard mythological/rape scene at $120-160K.
- A delightful Vuillard panel is estimated at $800K-$1.2M. Here's betting it beats the high-end. (NYC'ers may remember seeing a lot of Vuillard's panels in this 2001 show at the Met.)
- Speaking of delightful, this is quite a blissy Matisse. Lots of trademark Matisse stuff here: a patterned blouse that blends into a floral arrangement, a flattening of space, and a big price tag. Estimate: $4-6M.
- Jeff Koons cheesecake estimated (not safe for work) at $200-300K. I'm rooting for it to top out at $100K or so.
- In Baltimore over the weekend, I saw a couple of Morris Louises that looked like de facto inclusions in a permanent collection installation. You know the type -- the Washington color school existed and here's proof. Well, here's a Morris Louis, estimated at $400-600K, that is the most interesting I've seen in a while. (OK, I've only seen it online, but you know what I mean.)
- Vija Celmins' auction results have been super-strong in recent years. I'd be surprised if this ocean drawing didn't blow away its $180-250K estimate. A similar work from the same year is in the National Gallery's collection. (This lot is a buy-for-MAN special. Buy it for me and I guarantee you a mention on MAN.)
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The Weekend That Was
One of the particular characteristics of a fine single-malt scotch is that after you pour yourself a dram, the scotch appreciates some moments to breathe, that is, a few moments to prepare itself for the finer, distinguished palate. It is these moments of which I am taking advantage to share some weekend thoughts.
My first idea was to poke fun at the New York Times for referring to Estee Lauder as a "warrior for beauty." (Would not a warrior for beauty have, at the very least, her mascara a bit smudged? Her rouge rendered runny? Would that not render the 'warrior for beauty' defeated, and, thus, no longer beautiful?) I quickly concluded that this was more in line with one of Chicha's present avocations and left it alone. (UPDATE: By this morning the Times has thought better of the 'warrior' bit and Lauder is now a 'pursuer' of beauty. Aren't we all.)
Instead, I am focusing on the Art Weekend that Was. On Saturday MAN and a MANpal took a field trip up to Baltimore, which I am reliably informed is The City That Reads. (This is discussed here by Laura Lippman.) It seems to me that given the city's rather high crime rate, it is somewhat more likely that Baltimore is The City That Reads Its Miranda Rights, but that is not such a good city slogan. On the other hand, Baltimore is the city that puts its "Welcome to Baltimore" sign on the side of a trash incinerator, so you never know.
All of this makes it all the more alarming that the most delightful art exhibit within 50 miles of the White House is in Baltimore, not Washington. Mind you, the competition being offered up by your nation's capital (apologies to the Canadians among us, but chances are you're too busy wondering if the Habs and Leafs can come back from 0-2 deficits) is rather ineffectual.
Over at the Hirshhorn, Douglas Gordon is reminding us that artists in their mid-30s are usually not quite ready for mid-career retrospectives. When the installation of a show is better than the show itself, one has stumbled upon an excellent indicator that a show is not quite good. (In youngish Gordon's favor is this: the more recent the work in this show, the better the work is.)
The National Gallery is showing Jim Dine drawings, which is probably all that need be said. (Undaunted, I've devoted several hundred words to the topic for Artnet and you'll have the opportunity to peruse my objections shortly.) The NGA's Diego Rivera mini-show is quite interesting but it contains only 20 canvases. The Phillips' Milton Avery show is stale. None of the shows in DC galleries move me in any particular direction except, I suppose, toward Baltimore.
And in Baltimore (remember Baltimore?), the Baltimore Museum of Art presents the region's most delightful show, Toulouse-Lautrec, Master of the Moulin Rouge. The title, as museum exhibit titles are apt to be these days, provides only marginal guidance as to the content of the show. (It might be said of the Hirshhorn's current show that its title, "Douglas Gordon," is its strong point. You may conclude for yourself whether this says more about the show or about museum exhibit-naming practices.)
The BMA show features posters and works on paper of Paris' nightlife as promoted and recorded by HT-L and his contemporaries. (There are also some Bonnard and Vuillard paintings of domestic interiors in the show. They do not fit and serve mostly to remind us that BMA owns Bonnards and Vuillards.) Iit is a most engaging show. Go see it. And now to my scotch.
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Last Go Around LA
I held off on this last post for a few days hoping I would receive some images from Daniel Weinberg Gallery. But they aren't here and their website is out of date, so I won't wait anymore (and I won't discuss the show, either). (UPDATE: Does the gallery really look like a double-wide? Yup.)
 Zhi Lin at Koplin Del Rio: For a couple of years I've been wondering why I haven't seen more contemporary Chinese art in California. Maybe Zhi Lin's show at Koplin explains why: to do edgy work, artists have to leave China. (Xiaoze Xie, recently soloed at Charles Cowles, has followed this path too). Zhi Lin's strong, determined show at Koplin makes me want to see more.
Lin's show (which was previously on view at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and at the University Art Gallery at Indiana State University and which will travel to the Spartanburg (SC) County Museum of Art) is built around four tall charcoal or mixed media on canvas paintings, hung with screen-printed ribbons. They feel slightly ornamental, like custom drapery. Their scale -- each is about 12 feet tall and seven feet wide -- recall centuries of history painting. Much history painting focuses on unjust violence, and so too do Lin's paintings.
In Firing Squad (1996), several Chinese are about to be executed by the Chinese army. The shootings haven't happened yet, but the four guns held to the backs of the heads of four men by four soldiers make clear what is about to happen. (A detail of about 1/8th of the painting is at left.) In Decapitation a man is bound and is about to have his head sliced off as another dozen men, bound, await the same fate. Lin doesn't show us blood-and-guts brutality, he merely allows us to complete the sentence with our imaginations.
Lin doesn't show us the violence because that isn't what these paintings are about. Surrounding each scene of violence is a scene of Chinese going about daily life. They're eating dinner, selling goods at market, walking their bicycles across a street. Many of them are wearing Western symbols: a Mickey Mouse mask or a McDonald's hat.
These are not paintings about violence and repression. These are paintings about affluence and how it can create willed ignorance; they're about two Chinas, Chinas Lin has forced to co-exist on his canvases. Lin's paintings never quite sink to the level of temporal, one-issue political art. Violent repression has happened throughout human history, and artists have been painting about it for centuries.
Lin's works are reminders that while we are told that the creation of a middle class leads to social change and increased liberties, that same process can also lead to a perpetuation of greater self-interest and a tolerance of brutality.
Last note: Perhaps the worst opening sentence to a press release I've ever read: " t is arguable that there are moments within the cultural discourse of the recent past that have managed to evade clear-cut reassessment," from the press release to the Paul Hosking show at Karyn Lovegrove. The sentence was taken from From "Cute Sinister: Liam Gillick on Paul Hosking," in the catalog for the 2002 Beck's Futures show...
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Banal Wolfgang, Day Four
"Ten years ago, I couldn't have created such a matter-of-fact image of a woman's body as I did in the crotch shot. That was a step forward for me."
In a related story, I recently recognized that artists obsessed with sharing their artistic instrospection Oprah-style are, as a matter-of-fact, intensely boring. That was a big step forward for me.
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Terry Teachout on being a critic
Before Terry turned himself in to an NYC police precinct, he was on Studio 360 last week talking about the role of the critic. Go listen to it. It's a darn good listen, especially if you're an artist of one stripe or another. I wanted to spotlight two passages. The quotes are Terry's, what follows is me:
"Writing bad reviews is the easiest part of a critics job, it simply comes easier. I don't like doing it... It is not the part of criticism that drew me here. What I like to write about is things I like. I don't want to spend two hours seeing something that's boring... I really see my own mission as a writer in drawing the attention of readers to something wonderful that they don't know about or changing their perception of something they do know about."
Agreed. I generally think that there's no point in writing something negative about an artist unless that negative criticism opens the door to a broader issue. (See my forthcoming Jim Dine review on Artnet.) It's easy not to like something, it's harder to have a reason to write about why not liking it is important.
"The best criticism is the fullest sense of the word enthusiastic. It's about the conveying of your enthusiasm, your passion. If your passion isn't there, the criticism isn't going to be interesting to read... What I'm really interested in is writing about things I love. If I can make more people love those things I have not written in vain."
Agreed again. One of the nice things about blogging (as Terry points out on Studio 360) is that I can write about whomever I want. I don't have to sell an editor on a relatively unknown artist or show or arts issue, I can just plug/discuss it.
It's also easier (for me anyway) to be enthusiastic either pro or con when I'm typing. I think that critical thought requires introspection and consideration. To do those things at the pace of normal conversation is strange, even difficult, for me. I have a tendency to think about art no more swiftly than my fingers can type.
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Stuck inside
This is easily my least favorite time of the year. For the last week or so, I've been spending all my time in my apartment, avoiding the pollen that has taken over the air outside. I'm super-allergic to tree pollen and no city in America has more flowering trees than DC. They're all having sex right now.
So what's an art lover to do when he can't go look at art? Well, I've been reading. Right now I'm slogging my way through Suzaan Boettger's Earthworks, a thorough history of the Earth Art in the 1960s. A page-turner it's not and Boettger has a way with words that recalls how Gerry Ford had a way with stairs, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. Boettger is strongest when she's talking about Robert Smithson, perhaps because there's more documentation about Smithson than several other of the Earthers. It's not a must-read, but if you're interested in minimalism or in the way Westerners responded to the dominance of New York, it's worth checking out.
I've also been paging through the Lee Bontecou catalog, which I received for my birthday. (As of this posting, Amazon has it at 40 percent off.) It's fantastic. The show is fantastic. If you're in Chicago, get to it soon. If you're in New York, you have something to look forward to.
On the bright side, by the end of today I should be caught up on reader e-mail. (It's amazing how Andreas Gursky inspires people to email. Could it be those near-$900,000 auction prices? The Gursky email is pretty evenly split but both sides of the Gursky debate really, really feel strongly about him. Reminds me of the Matthew Barney email a while back.)
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Banal Wolfgang, Day Three
If you express enough outrage at something obvious, you must be saying something important: "It is still considered more obscene to show two men kissing before the watershed on TV than it is to show two men kill each other. How can something as atrocious as the destruction of two men be acceptable, and the sight of men kissing scandalous? This isn't just upsetting. It's obscene."
Wait, I'm confused. The kissing is obscene? Or the violence? Or is he referring to The Guardian's failure to provide him with an editor?
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Tortured or inspired?
There is an ad in the current New Yorker that cracks me up. It's for Visa and features an art dealer (she must be an art person; she's dressed in black) talking with a collector (he must be a collector; he's wearing a suede jacket, arms folded pensively). The text: "He will never be the tortured artist, just the inspired collector."
Now why is it that the artist isn't inspired and the collector isn't tortured?
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Michael Schnabel at Bank
 If I had just returned from 20 years in Antarctica and wandered into an art gallery, I would find Michael Schnabel’s images fascinating.
Now on view at Bank in downtown Los Angeles, Schnabel's Cage Series of photographs was mostly taken in zoos built in Germany and Switzerland between the end of the 19th century and the 1970s. The geometry of the zoo cages is captivating and confining. The colors and industrial surface textures he presents are vivid and creepy. Schnabel photographs dichotomies.
Inescapable in each of Schnabel’s photographs is the fundamental contradiction of a modernist zoo: modernist architecture was built around the concept of accessibility-for-the-masses. These are photographs of cages and other spaces where animals are held captive. The accessibility built into these spaces is for humans, not the animals.
Because there are no animals in any of Schnabel's photographs at Bank, the viewer is left with the architecture, the space, often the grid of the cage – and the understanding of what the space is for. Schnabel plays with the grid and what grids mean to art viewers and in the world outside art galleries. Art viewers are used to seeing grids recede from the picture plane, providing depth to an image. In Schnabel's work that grid is shoved square to the viewer. The grid is no longer a technique for the artist, it is a real thing with a real application. In my favorite Schnabel, that grid creates the part of a cage nearest a zoo-goer. It keeps the zoo-goer from being stampeded by a giraffe.
 If I had just returned from 20 years in Antarctica, all of this would be new to me. But I haven't and it's not. I have seen photographs very much like these before. It's impossible not to think about Schnabel within the context of the dominant photographic movement of the last 20 years: Big Germanism. No matter where an art-viewer goes, the Big German aesthetic is inescapable. The recipe is familiar: Make photographs big, amp up their color, and put them behind a shiny reflective surface.
Schnabel's photographs do not deviate from this recipe. They are huge: four feet by six feet. (Art people have long talked about the size of photographs in inches, but thanks to Big Germanism that now seems like talking about the volume of the oceans in fluid ounces.) The color in them is saturating, soaking, and I can’t help but think that no zoo built in central Europe in the 1970s could possible be this tone-wonderful. And they’re c-prints. And they’re behind a shiny, reflective surface.
Struth and Hofer may have done this kind of photography before some other artists, but Schnabel, Miles Coolidge, Ola Kolehmainen, Anita Witek, and plenty of others all make photographs that are very good when viewed in a vacuum, but within the context of much photography of the last 20 years, they feel familiar.
Is it possible to make big, colorful, shiny photography that doesn't feel familiar? Maybe so. Maybe that's one reason an artist like Sally Mann chooses to use a 150-year old process like wet-collodion in her recent work. Maybe other photographers, having noticed that Big Germanism now merits its own Sunday New York Times story will begin to look for other ways to make a visual impact. I can hope.
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Banal Wolfgang, Day Two
"Why, however, are the naked people shown in newspapers and magazines never men? This is blatant inequality."
Wolfgang is right. Equality in nakedidity (as Radar O'Reilly would say) is important.
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The Inky Plan for the Barnes, Part two
Yesterday I pointed out what I think are several of the holes in The Inky Plan for the Barnes. I think The Inky Plan fails as a redevelopment plan and I think that the plan requires leadership, vision, and administrative skill to pull off. We've seen none of those qualities from Barnes leaders in recent years.
That's not to say I don't wish that The Inky Plan could work. As an idea for an art/etc. space, it has promise. It's just a bad economic revitalization plan.
I still think that there are lots of good reasons for the Barnes to move to the Parkway, but I concede that it would be tremendously exciting if The Inky Plan could work. (Unlikely, but exciting.) So here are my ideas on how The Inky Plan would have to be modified before it could succeed. I'll also preface all this by saying, again, that the only way this can all happen is if there's new leadership at the Barnes. And I don't have the foggiest idea how or when that could happen. After all, would you trust someone with a $50,000 donation when they're known piano-losers?
1.) If the Barnes is to stay in Merion, it must be as part of a comprehensive plan, not a quickie solution that would merely add a parking lot and nothing else.
2.) A comprehensive plan for the current Barnes property plus the Episcopal Academy property should then include, at a minimum, the following elements:
- Underground parking, 200-500 spaces worth;
- Restoring the horticultural component of the Barnes program, including remodeling/restoring the greenhouse;
- Remodeling/restoring the main building and installing a viable climate control system;
- Building a conservation laboratory somewhere in the greater Philadelphia area so that works in the collection can be better maintained;
- Moving the Foundation offices off-site so that the Barnes residence can be opened to the public;
- Building a new building, on the Episcopal Academy property, that will house special, temporary exhibits related to the Foundation and to Barnes himself. Some ideas for exhibits: A history of pragmatism, the story of Barnes' first trip to Europe; the story of Barnes' relationship with Matisse; perhaps even small, tight special exhibitions of art, such as a show of drawings Matisse did for his Barnes mural. This would enable the Barnes to charge more than $5, opening up a crucial revenue stream.
3.) Sell Ker-Feal already! (Here's where Ker-Feal is.)
4.) Were the Barnes to follow The Inky Plan, the foundation funding bunch in Philly would be livid. It is unlikely that even the most competent management could maintain good relations with the foundation funders after spurning their plan. But here's an idea that would cost the foundations a fraction of the money and would contribute to their goal of making the Ben Franklin Parkway a major arts destination. Put the Barnes' conservation lab on the Parkway and open it to the public the way the Smithsonian opened their American flag conservation lab to the public. Build some exhibit space into the building and use it for historical exhibits, similar to the way the Getty Research Institute uses their exhibit space. (This is basically an alternative to the idea I outlined a couple paragraphs ago, and borrows heavily from a suggestion that Jon Anderson contributed to the WSJ. At least I think it does -- if I'm misattributing the idea I'm sure someone will let me know. If I had Lexis/Nexis...)
5.) I reserve the right to add items as I think about this more!
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Big Photography
Admin update: In the interests of not overwhelming readers accessing via dial-up with three images in the top screen or two, I'll probably post Schnabel tomorrow.
In addition to whatever interesting items pop up across my screen today, MAN will feature two posts about big photography. First I'll discuss the Philip Gefter essay about big photography that was in Sunday's New York Times. Then I'll be writing about Michael Schnabel's first American solo show, at Bank in Los Angeles. (My next Barnes thought will probably be on Wednesday.)
In the NYT, Gefter writes about how technology has enabled larger photographic printing, and how photographers, notably Misrach, Gursky, and every German ever born, have made the size of a picture fundamental to their work. In the Gursky Doctrine, size is as important as content.
(I'll leave alone for a moment that I think Gursky is probably the most overrated artist on the planet. His images, seen in person, come off as technically inept -- they're blurry, the color is bleedy, and I have absolutely no interest in looking at what he photographs. They're all about one thing: size is everything. Several artists/photographers I've talked with lately have each said that they don't understand the cult of Gursky and that he's technically not very good.)
 I think Gefter leaves out one key driving force behind big photography: price. A few weeks ago I visited Toronto to spend some time with Ed Burtynsky. (A mid-career survey of Burtynsky's work is on its way to Stanford, San Diego and the Brooklyn Museum.) Burtynsky said that all photographers are indebted to the Big Germans because by making their prints really big, they enabled photographers to charge big prices, the kinds of prices that painters were getting. (Why else would Joel Sternfeld -- that's his McLean, Virginia, December 1978 at left -- make new, really big prints of old, previously printed images? The new versions of McLean, recently on view at Luhring Augustine, are over 20 times bigger than the image shown here.)
Of course in the art world, it's gauche to discuss market forces, so Richard Misrach's Ess Eff dealer, Jeffrey Fraenkel, discusses this very issue in a roundabout way: "Once it became possible to make authoritative large-scale prints, photographers could challenge the other arts, especially painting, on a level playing field." Yes, and the playing field is price.
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Banal Wolfgang, Day One
Encouraged by some very naughty people who like it when MAN gets snarky, every day this week I will feature something stupid, banal or both written by Wolfgang Tillmans in The Guardian. You may, if you so choose, thank me for not including a Tillmans image with every quote. (Of course, after you read the really puerile pun that is included in today's quote, you probably will rescind your thanks.) Without further ado, today's keyword is banal:
"The photograph shows very clearly what a woman's genitals look like - something few men, even heterosexual men, have any real idea of. Its focus is sex, but it also acknowledges that this is where we come from. The image doesn't beat around the bush: it isn't titillating, nor is it shocking."
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Barnes news
On Sunday the Philly Inky all but came out in favor of keeping the Barnes where it is -- with a twist. The Inky Plan is that the Barnes should purchase a plot of land that runs between the Foundation's property and City Avenue. (Username: ajreader @ artsjournal.com; Password: access.)
Here are two maps that might help you visualize the plan. First, this is an Acrobat file from the Barnes' website giving you an idea of how the Barnes Foundation fills about half of a square plot between Latch's Lane and City Avenue. This Yahoo map shows you how roughly the footprint of the available land.
Let's address the key questions: Could The Inky Plan work? And could the Inky Plan fix what ails the Barnes?
The Inky Plan has the same basic underpinning as the 'Foundation Partnership' plan that Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania have proposed: Both are art-institution-as-economic-growth-engine plans. The foundations plan to move the Barnes to the Ben Franklin Parkway and to create an arts district that drives economic growth. The Inky is advocating using the Barnes as a redevelopment anchor for City Avenue, aka the most depressing street in the world to feature a Saks Fifth Avenue. (The ratio of oil-and-lube shops to Saks Fifth Avenues between the Barnes and the Schuylkill Expressway is probably 9-to-1.)
Neither the foundation plan nor the Inky plan is primarily about the art. Therefore, I'm going to consider the Inky plan as what it is: a redevelopment plan. As such, it's a lousy idea. At the outside, the most the Barnes could ever really hope to draw per day (even if neighbor-related restrictions were lifted) is 1,500 visitors, five days a week. A daily inflow of just 1,500 people does not change a street or a neighborhood. Aside from the Barnes, there's nothing to draw outsiders to the area. (I mean, it's not even a good Saks.)
The next question is: Does The Inky Plan address the Barnes' problems?
Well, it depends on what you think the Barnes' problems are. If you think accessibility and neighborly relations are the two prime problems, then yes, it probably addresses those probems. If you think money, fundraising ability, institutional administration and the condition of the building/collection are the Barnes' problems, then The Inky Plan fails because it leaves those problems unaddressed.
(And of course, there's the issue of the foundations' interest/hijacking/whatever you want to call it. That's either a problem, a plus, or more muddled than ever after Ott's last ruling. It's a safe assumption that if the Barnes got interested in The Inky Plan that the foundations and the governmental partners would bow out. They want the Barnes downtown, as part of an economic redevelopment plan, and as part of an implied Philly Museum-led fiefdom. For now we're going to leave the foundations alone and just address The Inky Plan.)
One other reason that The Inky Plan doesn't address the Barnes' problems is that there is no evidence that the current Barnes leadership could implement The Inky Plan and make it work. (Judge Ott probably doesn't think they can make it work either.) But let's just say that a new Barnes board cleans house, adds strong board members quickly and hires stronger leaders. (And, after all that happens, the oceans will turn to yogurt.)
What if the Barnes can get $20 million for Ker-Feal? That would change everything, and Judge Ott has strongly indicated that a sale of Ker-Feal and the millions it would bring would determine whether or not a move is absolutely necessary. So here's what it would take for The Inky Plan to work for the Barnes: The Barnes would have to net at least $15 million for Ker-Feal. Then they'd buy the Inky-suggested land for $10 million and have $5 million to turn it into parking, etc. Anything over $15 million for Ker-Feal would help fix up the main building. The the Barnes would have to radically restructure its board and administration, two things it has shown no interest in doing. So it all seems a little far-fetched, no?
This is where we'll pick up tomorrow on...
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The Whitney Presents...
Last week I had a post on how Michael Heizer was threatening to destroy City, his mammoth earth installation in Nevada's Lincoln County. This just in:
Whitney curator Chrissie Iles is putting together a show about Heizer's City. It will likely open at the Whitney XXXX.
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News and Notes
Atlanta's High Museum will originate a Morris Louis retrospective in 2006. (Thanks AJ.)
The WSJ has a nice Matthew Gurewitsch piece on the re-packaging of the Brooklyn Museum today. It's well worth a $1 to go pick it up, as it's not online. (The BM -- no, not the one in London -- is having a shindig-filled weekend.) The piece ends:
"A lifetime ago, [Brooklyn Museum director Arnold] Lehman served as an "unrecognizable staffer" (his phrase) at the Met in the era of Thomas Hoving, the man still remembered as the P.T. Barnum of the museum world and the inventor of the blockbuster. In his memoir Making The Mummies Dance, Mr. Hoving shares the philosophy on which he built his career: 'Any institution that's falling behind has to do things that will make it very interesting, controversial and talked about around the community. Both ways, you know, 'I love it' or 'I condemn it.' They have to make people realize that it has a heartbeat. These days the key is to be a vital member of the community.'
Is it fair to say that Mr. Lehman has brought the Hoving Paradigm to Brooklyn? 'I never thought about that,' he answers. 'Tom tried a lot of untested things. He did an enormous amount of good for the museum. And he was one of the first 'modern' museum directors: one who thought about the institution externally as well as internally. I'm honored to have a dotted line traced from him to me, or more accurately, stretching back from me to him.'"
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Some LA Favorites
Some shows in LA that I enjoyed...
 Peter Wegner @ Griffin Contemporary (Santa Monica): Wegner makes paintings and installations about information and the way we transmit and process it. His installation in the main gallery at Griffin, Architecture of the Air, features three large grid-like mazes made out of housepaint, screen-printed letters, and graphite. We can't see how information -- wifi, cell phone calls, radio waves -- moves around us, so Wegner imagines it for us. Wegner's work is a fine demonstration of how work that is conceptual in nature can be made visually appealing. My favorite work in the show was a red paper sculpture that reduces a bookcase down to color and paper form. In the main room Wegner makes something we can't see beautiful, and in the smaller space he made something we are used to seeing more beautiful by reducing it to a visual minimum.
Brad Spence @ Shoshana Wayne (Bergamot Station): Spence's paintings of the beginning of the end, the moment between life and death, are creepy in an X-Files kind of way. As paintings they read like too-simple Photoshop collages fancied up with the suddenly omnipresent airbrush, but the subject matter is captivating. A few weeks ago Jerry Saltz wrote that more artists should stop relying on technology to make paintings and that they should their hands. Spence is a good example -- his technique deprives his paintings of much soul and personality.
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Tim Bavington at Mark Moore Gallery
Artists and critics, doubtful of the public’s ability to accept abstract painting for its own sake, have long pointed out that abstractions are derived from stuff. Mondrian showed us that his abstractions were rooted in a series of paintings he did of a single tree. When he moved across the Atlantic, Mondrian took pains to point out that his canvases were rooted in the rhythms of New York City. Various abstract expressionists reported that their paintings were rooted in emotions, the human psyche, that their canvases were reflections of the physicality of their art. Abstraction, for some reason, has to come from somewhere. Aren’t we over that yet?
Uh, no. Abstract painting is nearing the end of its first century and still abstract painters feel a need to legitimize their work by giving it roots in something tangible. The latest example is Tim Bavington, a Las Vegas-based painter who is receiving a solo show at Santa Monica’s Mark Moore Gallery. In the titles of his new work, Bavington tells us that they have something to do with certain sections of various songs by bands like Stone Roses and The Darkness.
 I do not care. Bavington’s vertically stripy, neon, spray-painted and airbrushed paintings are plenty fascinating enough to exist without the crutch of tangible reference. I love the color, I love the patterns, I love the way Bavington mixes references as varied as Donald Judd, Gene Davis, minimalist seriality, and African textiles. Forget about Bavington’s titles and song references and enjoy the painted surfaces for the fun the have to offer on their own. The five paintings in this show are plenty fascinating enough to do just that.
Bavington is, famously, a painter of the Las Vegas School, a school that came and went as quickly as Dave Hickey arrived at UNLV and left for Otis. While in Las Vegas, Bavington synthesized the city's neon optics, the airbrush/spray-painting popular in parts of America's car culture and mixed them with plenty of modern art references. If this all sounds a bit far-fetched, if it all sounds too messy to make good art out of all that disparate stuff, a current show by Bavington's Vegas Schoolmate Yak at Western Project
At first glance, these are the same old Bavingtons. But the more closely I looked, the more I saw that Bavington is subtly adding words to his stripe-based language. In Love on the Rocks (With no Ice) and Roll With It, Bavington repeats striped patterns within each work, a trick of seriality derived from minimalism. Bavington even builds Roll With It out of five stacked canvases, a riff on Judd’s stacked boxes.
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Last American Artist?
It's taken me years, but I finally have spent enough time with Cy Twombly's work to enjoy it. (The fantastic Twombly room at the Philly Museum is a major contributing factor.) I particularly enjoy reading about Twombly and his work. So on the occasion of a Twombly drawing/works on paper survey show at London's Serpentine Gallery, The Guardian's Jonathan Jones wrote about Twombly. But with an opening paragraph or two like this, why bother reading:
"Cy Twombly is the last great American artist.
Never say never, but it seems almost inconceivable that another epic talent like his will appear in an American art world that has spent nearly half a century dismissing its own achievements."
When was the guy last in the United States? This is standard stuff for Jones, who seems incapable of writing about an American artist without telling us that American art is over. A wee bit of a broad generalization, I think...
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Monets in the Dark/Heat/Etc.
Among the reasons that accredited museums should not be sending their art to non-accredited spaces is the lack of climate control systems in those non-accredited spaces. Why something like this might happen: The power in the entire Bellagio complex might go out, leaving the MFA Boston's Monets to cook in the Vegas heat. That would never happen, would it? Oh, but it has. The hotel says the art is fine, but what else would they say? To say otherwise would open them up to a massive lawsuit:
"'Furthermore, enough air is circulated by the minimal emergency power that the art work hanging in the hotel and in the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art should not be damaged,' [hotel spokesman Alan] Feldman said."
As a public service, MAN presents your Las Vegas weather conditions from the MAN weather deck: Today's high will be 85 degrees, with relative humidity in the teens.
Tuesday update: Bellagio still without power. Today's temp: a sunny 82 degrees.
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Around the blogosphere
Updates throughout the afternoon/evening:
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Photographers of Genius
Photographers of Genius, the Getty Center’s exhausting and Cliff's Notes-inspired history of photography, is likely the only museum exhibit ever inspired by a beer commercial. At least I assume it was. Not only did the Getty blatantly rip off Bud Light's "Real Men of Genius" ads by calling their show "Photographers of Genius," they managed to distill the history of photography into 30-second spots. (And allowed me to link to one of my very favorite hockey blogs, too.) It was a completely numbing exhibition. Imagine seeing the entire history of photography, presented as a march through a few images of each of 40 or so photographers.
Because we’re such a helpful bunch here at MAN, here are some ideas for future Getty shows:
Transportation of Genius: The history of human transportation, featuring wheels, carts, horses, bicycles, cars, planes and those little semi-subways that take you one of the hills that forms the Sepulveda Pass.
Food of Genius: The history of food, featuring rice, pizza, pasta, gyros, subs, roasts, vegetables, grits, and the utility of mini-BBQ stands in the midst of Richard Meier-designed complexes.
Gardens of Genius: The history of planted areas, including the Hanging Gardens of Mesopotamia, the Business of Tulips, agricultural planting, and whether or not a garden can be elevated to art if it is designed by a well-known artist.
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Preparing to look at art
More on art in LA coming up, but first...
Courtesy of ArtsJournal (take away the blogs and AJ is still the coolest site on the internet), this interesting mini-essay by the Orange County Register's Timothy Mangan on the process of experiencing art. (I promise it's a better read than I just made it sound, so go read. Username: ajreader; password: access.)
Mangan raises a question that occurs to visual arts fans too. I'll use my recent LA trip (I can hear NY'ers complaining already... shaddup!) as an example. Before I left for LA I thought about whether I wanted to read the MOCA's minimalism catalog before I saw the show. I ultimately decided against it because I wanted the exhibit to be my first impression of the show, not the catalog. After all, 99 percent of the people who go to the show will encounter the art before the encounter the written scholarship about the art. I think that's the way it should be -- the art comes first, the writing/scholarship comes later. Even with minimalism? Even with minimalism.
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Herbie & Miu Miu
Site update: Over there on the right, Five to See has been updated.
I love it when I come home and the blogosphere goes all Queer Eye on Herbert Muschamp and Miu Miu Prada: Gawker makes fun of them and so does Greg Allen. (And if you don't know what we're all snickering at, you should really pay more attention to your NYT Sunday Magazine. I'm not sure why you should pay more attention to it, you just should.)
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Back from LA
Admin note: I'm about a week behind on email. I'll try to get caught up today.
I’m just back from three days of art-viewing in Los Angeles and boy is my butt tired. (The great frustration about viewing art in LA, of course, is all the driving you have to do: From Mid-Wilshire to West Hollywood to Santa Monica to Venice to Chinatown to downtown to whatever I’m forgetting.)
Later today I'll post a quick five faves list and during the week I’ll post some show-specific write-ups, probably about the work of Zhi Lin and Tim Bavington. For now, some ‘awards’ from three days of LA art-looking:
A sitting-O: To Koplin del Rio and Griffin Contemporary, the only two commercial galleries I visited that offer benches. (I hear Sixspace is adding seating too.) Simple idea, good idea.
Take that NYC: Every single gallery I asked for a CD of a show had one to give me. Well, every gallery except Koplin del Rio. They have a server set up with high-res images of their current show, available to anyone who needs them. Fantastic. (This is unheard of in NYC, where galleries think that preventing the dissemination of images is helpful to their artists.)
Most boring show: The Last Picture Show at the Hammer Museum. This is a perfectly serviceable, academic show about how photography has been used to make a record of conceptual art. It’s fine as far as it goes, but as with a great deal of conceptual art, the show lacked any soul or visual excitement.
Most present 20th century technique: Seriality. Witness: LACMA’s Jasper Johns numbers show, lots of artists (of course) in MOCA’s minimalism show, Tim Bavington @ Mark Moore, Katrin Korfmann @ Carl Berg, Pae White @ the Hammer, and William Garnett’s 1950 photos of the development of Lakewood, California, photos that anticipate the seriality of much minimalist work, work that was still a decade away.
Worst exhibit: Patty Chang’s exhibit at Roberts & Tilton. I’m just not interested in watching three videos, installed side-to-side-to-side, in which men sit on a toilet and shave themselves. Down there. More surprising: That anything could push a Gillian Wearing show (Regen Projects) to second-worst.
Chilliest gallery: Gallery-going in Los Angeles is a friendly affair, generally full of gallerinas and gallerinos who are happy to see you, who greet you with a handshake or a smile or something similar. This is quite a departure from Chelsea, where every gallerina is required to attend the Mary Boone School of Studious Gallerina/o Ignorance. Out of 40-50 gallery stops, only one gallery completely ignored me from entrance to exhibit. That would be you Marc Selwyn Fine Arts.
Most confusing show: Gio Ponti at ACME. This show was a mix of furniture and art. The gallery’s price list, which had no map, diagram or other helpful guidance, only made the jumbled installation more confusing.
Most promising looking show: Whatever was up at Chinatown’s 4-F. I wouldn’t know what was up or if I liked it, because I could only see a little bit of it through the locked gate in front of the gallery. Memo to galleries: be open during gallery hours.
Worst continuation on a theme: Richard Colman at Merry Karnowsky, where several drawings featured a woman orally pleasuring a bear. Colman’s show was kind of fun, it didn’t need to fall back on the bestial silliness so en vogue of late.
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Live from LA
Greetings from downtown LA. I'm right across the street from where we'll be holding tomorrow night's abLA/MAN beverage fest and fresh back from a delightful meal in Hollywood.
For easterners who travel to LA to look at art, the first day is always an odd adventure. Basically, we have two choices: we can take an early flight and spend the afternoon looking at work, or we can take a mid-day flight and do Thursday night at the Hammer. My flight today dropped me into LA a little before noon and with a little help from Avis Preferred I was in Santa Monica not long thereafter. I spent the afternoon driving from spot to spot in Santa Monica and Culver City, seeing Dave Hickey acolytes everywhere I went. (OK, not everywhere. Tim Bavington is at Mark Moore and Yak is at Western Project. So two.) I visited about 15 galleries today, which counts as a good start to the weekend. I'll have more to say about several of them next week. (In NYC I can do 15 galleries in a couple hours. In LA: it takes the entire noon-to-6 window.)
Follow-up from this post: Santa Monica's Griffin Contemporary has benches. Two of them. Someone give them a piece of pie. (And, like Mark Moore, when I asked for a CD they made one on the spot. That should get them a second link. Are you listening, Chelsea galleries?)
(Side note: Chelsea, a multi-street strip mall of contemporary art. Bergamot Station, a strip mall of contemporary art (and some crap) in a parking lot. Not completely dissimilar.)
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Fifty people = over $250 million
In the NYT this morning, Carol Vogel tells us that MoMA will reopen on Nov. 20. Nothing else in the story is terribly new, but this sentence is a jaw-dropper:
"Fifty trustees contributed $5 million or more," said Glenn D. Lowry, the Modern's director. "And the momentum hasn't stopped."
According to MoMA's website, they have 71 trustees. Eleven of those are honorary trustees and Lowry is an ex-officio trustee. That leaves 59 active trustees. This makes 50 trustees each kicking in $5M all the more remarkable. And I wonder which nine didn't pony up...
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Would Michael Heizer destroy City?
 Michael Heizer is threatening to destroy City, the mammoth earth installation he's been building in the Nevada desert since 1971. At least that's the word from a story in the Las Vegas Mercury. (Which is from March 11, but I'm a slow reader.)
Here's the story: For years the federal government has been exploring the potential storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada. The feds have been studying two ways to get nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain: through Clark County and the Las Vegas exurbs, or by rail through more rural Lincoln County (while Michael Kimmelman kept Heizer's secret for some reason, here at MAN we blab and blab), where Heizer's city is located. According to the Mercury, the rail line would go right past the outskirts of Heizer's property. The Mercury continues:
"Needless to say, the not-so-friendly artist wasn't pleased to hear that a nuke waste railroad line was planned for the outskirts of his land. He told his neighbors that if the Caliente Corridor becomes reality, he will use his bulldozers to completely bury the City project and that he will walk away from it, in the belief that noisy trains will destroy the whole vibe."
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Sticks & Stones & MAN
James S. Russell is on a roll over at AJ's Sticks & Stones. (See the top two posts.)
My takes: The LAT's Ouroussoff should have won the criticism Pulitzer. His work from Baghdad was among the best journalism I've read all year. Click here to read the series -- Ouroussoff's pieces (and the accompanying slideshows) are truly worth some time.
The Art Gallery of Ontario events make upa primer in how not to run a non-profit organization. Regarding architect Barton Myers, as I recall he did not see the 1993 project through to completion, that is, he left the project before it was finished.
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Minimalism, etc.
One of the nice things about museum shows is that they provide a nice peg to re-read some favorite books and art histories. As I noted on the right-hand side of the site last month, the current run of ubiquitous minimalism has inspired me to re-read some books about minimalism, in most cases books that I haven't opened in years. (Memo to self: Ask MOCA LA what books are selling best in their bookstore while their minimalism show is up.) Some thoughts:
Minimalism by James Meyer. This is the best, most detailed (sometimes too detailed) history of how minimalism happened in New York in the early-to-mid sixties. Meyer is, like me, a big Anne Truitt fan, so it's fun to read how Meyer places her centrally in his narrative -- or his work-ative, anyway. Much of his book deals with the polemics and critical writing from the period, a part of minimalism's development in which Truitt did not participate until she published her three journals: Daybook, Prospect and Turn. Each of which I'm re-reading (or have just re-read) now.
Earthworks by Suzaan Boettger. Where Meyer leaves off (chronologically), Boettger picks up. (Meyer finishes up in roughly 1965ish, Boettger starts in 1967.) Because Boettger is focused like a laser on the use of earth (read: dirt) to make art, she barely mentions James Turrell, for example. Heizer's City has been underway for years, and, oddly, Boettger gives it barely a mention and a footnote.
Sol Lewitt: A Retrospective. Not much text here, but much visual fun from Gary Garrels' Lewitt show that did the rounds a few years ago. Mostly eye candy.
Art and Objecthood by Michael Fried: Because the lead essay, an indictment of minimalism, ended up defining minimalism better than the participants could.
Others I could have mentioned but that I haven't re-read recently (but probably will...): Donald Judd: Complete Writings, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, and more to come...
Book I don't own (yet): The Tate Modern's Donald Judd catalog.
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Who names these shows?
Q: What on earth is A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968? A: An exhibit about minimalism. Well, why didn't they just say so? The better title would have been: Minimalism. Or if you really like cutesy titles, how about Abject Objecthood?
Actually, maybe MOCA LA's title is better than the title of the Guggenheim's minimalism show: Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) Art from 1951 to the Present. Both of these are better than this exhibit/catalog title: "Panoramas for the people, or, an exhibition of selected watercolors depicting of historical views, picturesque wonders, Biblical and temperance scenes, tragic disasters, and interesting incidents in American history painted in panoramic form by two amateur artists sometimes referred to collectively as the Utica Artist and intended for the delight, entertainment, and moral instruction of the viewer: an exhibition."
So who names these shows? Curators. Apparently without any assistance from their marketing departments.
In an effort to inspire better exhibit naming (yes, I know, this is an even more futile endeavor than most of my pet projects, but so what?), MAN is sponsoring a two-day bit of fun. Email me your favorite bad exhibit titles and your favorite good exhibit titles (the early leader in this category is MoMA's New Images of Man). Include a link to the show, if possible. Later this week I'll post some favorites. I'm sure we'll discuss this at the MAN/abLA shindig in Los Angeles on Friday, too.
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Collector-curators
ArtForum points us toward an interesting story from Saturday's Miami Herald about how the Rubells are acting as collector-curators. The Rubells have long housed a portion of their collection in a publicly-accessible warehouse near Miami's Design District, but according to Elisa Turner the family is adding 8,000 square feet to the warehouse and will be working with Florida institutions and others to send works on the road.
I've long been interested in the increasing trend toward collector-driven exhibition places/museums and it sounds like the Rubells are taking this concept to the next (logical?) step. (Phaidon has published a book about their collection, too.) It will be interesting to see how the shows are received and who/how they are paid for. And if anyone else follows suit. After all, we all know collectors with more works in storage than on walls.
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Tired Friday
Over at ALN, Terry is pleading exhaustion and has bowed out for the week. While I've hardly written 8,000 words this week, I'm pretty crunchy too, so I'm going to follow his lead. We'll be back on Monday. (James S. Russell is picking up the slack for both of us with this fine post. Or go read what's up at artnet.) In the meantime, don't forget next Friday's fun:
Inspired by the success of the ArtsJournal get-together in New York a few weeks ago, abLA and MAN are teaming up to copy the idea. The concept is simple: we pick a bar, you show up and buy us drinks, and we all have a good time. (OK, the "buying us drinks" part is optional.) So here's the skinny:
Date: Friday, April 9
Time: 8 pm to whenever
Place: The Gallery Bar in the Millenium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (map here)
Parking: abLA, which is important enough to be written up in LA Weekly, tells me that the Biltmore has $3 valet parking!
Hope to see lots of you there!
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Permanent collection installations
Over at The Guardian, Jonathan Jones muses on the re-hanging of permanent collections in museums. Washingtonians are moderately familiar with this kind of thing -- the Hirshhorn has devoted much focus lately to ongoing re-presentations of its permanent collections. (The basement floor is being re-installed as I type. I wrote about the Hirshhorn's goings-on here.)
I don't think it's possible to say that re-hanging collections is always good or bad. That's absurdly broad. Instead, some more specific thoughts:
The Met: For the love of god and Matisse (which may be redundant), re-hang those contemporary galleries. They've barely changed in years.
The Phillips: When the new building opens, what will they do with their outstanding permanent collection?
SF MOMA: They leave their first half-dozen or so permanent collection galleries (up through Johns or so) pretty much the same, all the time. The rest they change up pretty regularly and the last gallery is usually devoted to recent purchases. (On my last trip, in December, they were featuring Victoria Morton and Koen van den Broek.) Good for them. And they installed a space-eating Turrell. Real good for them.
National Gallery of Art: See Met, The.
LACMA: I wonder if they know that art has been made in California in the last 50 years. Shuffle it up! (And yes, there is some California work up, but not nearly enough. Just one Diebenkorn last time I was there.)
Philly Museum of Art: About two years ago they re-modeled their modern and contemporary galleries and did a beautiful job. They re-install their 1970ish-forward galleries every few months. That's about right... but why not re-install post-1950 galleries just as often?
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David Bates and Sarah McEneaney
 The Phillips Collection hosted a slide lecture by David Bates last night. Bates gives good lecture, but I'm not a fan of his paintings. They're a little bit Texas and a little bit Hartley, Beckmann and Matisse. Bates doesn't so much as work through those artists as he works within them. Much of the time I feel like I've seen Bates' paintings before. And because I just had a nice glass of 15-year old scotch, I'm going to leave Bates' sculpture well-enough alone.
A couple of notes:
One of his teachers told him to make work that "requires no paperwork." Why? Because when the paper needed to explain your work is gone, so is your work.
Bates loves art history and refers on it all the time. Matisse's goldfish became Bates' redneck fisherman's minnows, for example. Those paintings are a reminder to me that a reference usually isn't enough, a riff off of the reference is important. (Ed.: Did you give us that phrase just for the alliterative fun? Me: Uh, yeah.)
Bates has painted a magnolia blossom every year since 1985. Conceptually, a cool idea.
Also, Bates' work reminded me a lot of the work of Sarah McEneaney, a Philadelphia painter current receiving a retro at the Philly ICA. Both are biographical painters who paint the things that are in close physical proximity to them. For Bates, that's Texas. For McEneaney, that's Philly. Both like to tip objects up against the picture plane. Both like expanses of flat, bright color. Ultimately, neither really does anything different enough to rise above the regionalist tag.
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